Local-direct media marketing will always top revenue opportunities going forward when compared to transactional media. Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D

Commentary

National/Local TV Ad Silos Will Collapse Before Linear/Streaming Silos Do

• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

Many of us have been waiting many, many years for advertisers and agencies to view streaming and linear TV channels as a holistic premium video world, where planning, buying, selling and measurement can be truly done together in a fully integrated way.

Historical silos in organization products, planning, buying, workflows and metrics have prevented this from happening. Yes, I know that day in and day out folks in our industry take stages at events or give quotes to trade media that claim to be true silo-busters operating in a real cross-channel way. But we know that, all too often, our industry loves to embrace what people say without a lot of attention to what they actually do.

Managing cross-channel linear and streaming TV media is a great example of that.

We’re an industry that is quite accustomed to silos. It wasn't that long ago that most major buying and selling organizations were structured by daypart, distribution and strategy. Broadcast daytime buyers couldn't touch prime, nor could they touch cable. Direct-response broadcast sellers couldn’t sell broadcast sports, and broadcast sports sellers couldn’t sell entertainment. And don’t even think about what would happen if a USA Network seller tried to sell CNBC.

Well, much of that world has changed. Shifts to streaming, increasing focus on audience-based approaches, and massive reductions in force across teams have finally broken the walls between many roles that had remained mysteriously disparate and siloed.

And national and local linear TV are next, even before linear and streaming come together. As national TV takes on more of an audience-based approach, with increasing focus on strategic target delivery and resulting outcomes, it’s only natural we will see local impressions optimized into national programs in a data-driven way to best meet advertisers’ goals.

Most advertisers had some geographic biases in where their target customers live, and where they can be found at scale cost-efficiently. We have had un-wired networks for a long time, but it was really hard to pull together truly integrated national and local activation and planning without tons of staffing to make it work. But predictive analytics, spot-level activation automation and integrated local and national measurement are changing that game.

Who knows, if Skydance/Paramount isn’t able to buy Warner Bros Discovery, why wouldn’t it buy a large local broadcast company, now that the government doesn’t seem to worry too much about the 40% coverage rule? If that’s the case, then the only way to maximize yield for the various national products and local programs and audiences need to be sold in a truly integrated way, not just sold in separate siloed buckets.

That future is coming fast, I think. What do you think?